SAN PEDRO — SULA — February, 1895.
[MY DEAR FAMILY:]
The afternoon of the day we were in Puerto Cortez the man
of war Atlanta steamed into the little harbor and we all
cheered and the lottery people ran up the American flag. Then
I and the others went out to her as fast as we could be rowed
and I went over the side and the surprise of the officers was
very great. They called Somers and Griscom to come up and we
spent the day there. They were a much younger and more
amusing lot of fellows than those on the Minneapolis and
treated us most kindly. It was a beautiful boat and each of
us confessed to feeling quite tempted to go back again to
civilization after one day on her. Their boat had touched at
Tangier and so they claimed that she was the one meant in the
Exiles. They told me that the guide Isaac Cohen whom I
mentioned in Harper's Weekly carries it around as an
advertisement and wanted to ship with them as cabin boy. We
left the next day on the railroad and the boys finding that
two negroes sat on the cowcatcher to throw sand on the rails
in slippery places bribed them for their places and I sat on
the sand box. I never took a more beautiful drive. We did
not go faster than an ordinary horse car but still it was
exciting and the views and vistas wonderful. Sometimes we
went for a half mile under arches of cocoanut palms and a
straight broad leafed palm called the manaca that rises in
separate leaves sixty feet from the ground. Imagine a palm
such as we put in pots at weddings and teas as high as Holy
Trinity Church and hundreds and hundreds of them. The country
is very like Cuba but more luxuriant in every way. There are
some trees with marble like trunks
and great branches covered with oriole nests and a hundred
orioles flying in and out of them or else plastered with
orchids. If Billy Furness were to see in what abundance they
grew he would be quite mad. It is a great pity he did not
come with us. This little town is the terminus of the
railroad and we have been here four days while Jeffs the
American Colonel in the Hondurean Army is getting our outfit.
It has been very pleasant and we are in no hurry which is a
good thing for us. It is a most exciting country and as
despotic as all uncivilized and unstable governments must be.
But we have called on the Governor of the district with Jeffs
and he gave us a very fine letter to all civil and unmilitary
authorities in the district calling on them to aid and protect
us in every way. I am getting awfully good material for my
novel and for half a dozen stories to boot only I am surprised
to find how true my novel was to what really exists here.
About ten years ago — — disappeared, having as I thought
drunk himself to death. He came up to me here on my arrival
with a lot of waybills in his hand and I learned that he had
been employed in this hole in the ground by a railroad for two
years. I remembered meeting him at Newport when I was still
at Lehigh, and last night he asked me to dinner and told me
what he had been doing which included everything from acting
in South America to blacking boots in Australia. His boss was
a Pittsburgh engineer who is apparently licking him into shape
and who told me to tell his father that he had stopped
drinking absolutely. His colored "missus" sat with us at the
table and played with a beetle during the three hours I stayed
there during which time he asked me about — — who he said
had
ruined him. He told
me of how — — had done and said this, and the contrast to
the
thatched roof and the mud floor and the Scotch American
engineer and the mulatto girl was rather striking. I never
had more luck in any trip than I have had on this one and the
luck of R. H. D. of which I was fond of boasting seems to hold
good. That man of war, for instance, was the only American
one that had touched at Puerto Cortez in
ten years and it
came the day we did and left the day we did. We saw a big
lithograph of Eddie Sothern in a palm hut here so we went
before a notary and swore to it and had three seals put on the
paper and sent it him as a joke. We start tomorrow the 22nd
so you see we are behind our schedule and I suppose you people
are all worried to death about us. We will be much longer
than six days on our way to Tegucigalpa as we are going
shooting and also to pay our respects to Bogran the
ex-president and the man who is getting up the next
revolution. But we take care to tell everyone we are
travelling for pleasure and are great admirers of Bonilla the
present president. Somers and I are getting on famously. He
is a very fine boy with a great sense of humor and apparently
very fond of me. We had five men counting Jeffs who we call
our military attache and Charwood and four drivers and eleven
mules so it is quite an outfit. In Ecuador with one more man
it would constitute a revolution.
DICK.
